Tropici

TROPICI opens in the brush of Northeast Brazil, where Miguel, a hired cattle herder, and his wife and children live. The owner of the herd has decided to move his cattle sough, and Miguel is now out of a job. Hearing of work in Recife, he buys passage on a truck for himself and his family, but fails to find employ there. A labor recruiter in Recife convinces him to make the long trip to Sao Paolo, again by truck. There he is hired as a construction worker on the Sao Paolo Hilton, and the films ends.

Such is the slight story of Tropici, a film about modern-day Brazil made by an Italian, Gianni Amico, for Italian television. But the content of Tropici is primarily political: the effects of foreign exploitation on a Third World nation. Amico has correctly realized that traditional narrative, no matter how portentous, is inadequate for describing a social reality that lies beneath surface story lines. Therefore he has interweaved his narrative with a conventional documentary which attempts to set Miguel's story in context, to explain in party why Miguel is unskilled, why a country so rich in resources has so little for its people. The answer lies in Brazil's history of foreign economic dominations, a history of successive one-product economies (sugar, gold, diamonds, rubber, coffee) developed by foreign capitalists and then subverted by fluctuations in the world market. Subjugated by Dutch, English, and American capital, the labor force (including African slaves) was shunted from state to state.

Visually the documentary parts have a seeming aimlessness that borders on irresponsibility. It includes one marvelous establishing shot of the Brazilian people: a tightly packed ferry nudges into dock, the retaining rope falls, and Brazilian men and women come running towards the camera in slow motion. Much of the rest of the footage comes on as a Coca-Cola travelogue, complete with the familiar dialectic of Old and New: large cathedrals, ornate Spanish architecture, monuments and statuary versus shots of the people gaily swinging through the busy streets of Brazil's modern cities, qua qua. And there to help them is American business, working and playing to build a strong, free Western Hemisphere. The whole gang's on hand: Coke, Ford, General Motors, Shell, Texaco, Esso, Frank Sinatra, even Helena Rubinstein with American beauty standards. But the spoken narration puts this post-card Brazil into perspective, reciting figures on the present-day poverty of the Brazilian people, on the history of foreign profiteering. The Old and the New are but emblems of successive ruling classes, the monuments they built to themselves and their success, leering gargoyles that mock the masses.

TROPICI'S narrative barely manages to hold one's attention. When the director isn't senselessly simulating documentary reality--for some incomprehensible reason he feels compelled to film every passenger clambering aboard the truck--he is indulging himself in cheap pyrotechnics. For what it's worth, a smidgen of narrative tension is supplied by a dissident passenger who knows what Sao Paolo holds and how their employers will treat them: "Your have to watch out for those gringoes ... they don't like paying money for nothing." He plans to give them the slip once they hit the city, or else "you're stuck for life." But at the film's close he too is trapped on the Hilton, and all we've learned from the story is that it's a long dusty drive from Recife to Sao Paolo.

What Tropici does best is record the landscape of foreign business domination. Once we lose Miguel, Tropici is strewn with interesting shots of the billboards that blister the countryside of Brazil, shouting "Texaco" "Ford" "Esso" at the passing cars. But this is rather small accomplishment; it's all there, as obvious as a Wheaties box. Tropici is betrayed by Amico's failure to integrate his narrative and documentary concerns, to deal with them not in isolation but in interaction. This failure gives his statement on foreign exploitation the ring of a superficial overview, rendering it less forceful, less immediate and real. The few times he manages to bring both elements into focus at once are the film's high points--for instance, a panning shot of the passengers waiting for their truck at a gas station starts out as a simple portrait, but is interrupted as a Texaco gas pump passes before us in the foreground. Too bad these moments are structurally isolated, a few good ideas jumbled together in a rather muddled effort.